​A midwest March sunrise causes collisions on the morning eastbound
commute. Your favorite radio host plays Here Comes the Sun and tells
you to get your shades on. It will be impossible to see the muskrat
crossing W. Michigan Ave., tail dragging the pavement in front of
Speedway, sidestepping motor oil and dumped french fries, no clue
what’s coming. You would swerve to avoid it if you knew it was there.
In a split second, you’d compromise yourself and the car that was so
cool when it first came out 15 years ago because the rodent waddles in
open air without so much as a blinking light on its back. You are nothing
if not m̶e̶e̶k̶ gentle. It is rare that you dream anymore. Night gives way to
morning without event and your eyes are bleary as you rise all the same.
When sleep extends into a Saturday and a n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶m̶a̶r̶e̶ scene melts into
waking, it stars one of your former loves cast ten years into the future,
their hair longer, tucked behind their ears in silver waves. They are
better dressed in the future, tailored layers and confidence. Everyone
remembers where they were when the jets flew into the World Trade
Center, but does anyone remember their last thought before falling
asleep that night? You lay there wondering if class the next day would
be canceled, if students would still be seated in semicircles watching
TVs rolled into the union building on carts, if some would still be
celebrating the assumption that this means war, what movement songs
would be written from those already-beating drums.

Emily R. Daniel's chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook Prize. Emily is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work can be found in The Penn Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Waxwing, Porter House Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Emily holds an MFA in Poetry from Western Michigan University, where she served as Poetry Editor for Third Coast Magazine. For more information, visit www.emilyrdaniel.com.